My First Smoke - Ribs, Eggs, and Burgers
Wood Chips
I used dry applewood chips. To burn in the smoker I used wet applewood chips but I thought I would give the dry ones a try and see how that went.
Dry Rub
I found a dry rub recipe on this site and for the single rack of ribs I was going to I halved the recipe.
- 1/8 cup kosher salt
- 1/8 cup sugar
- 1/8 cup paprika (calls for smoked paprika, but I didnt have that)
- 1 tablespoon black pepper
- 1/2 tablespoon garlic powder
- 1/2 tablespoon onion powder
- 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
I actually ran out of salt when making the rub so I added seasoned salt as a replacement. I don’t know if that was a good idea or not as you’ll read below.
Ribs
I started smoking at 10:30 am with just the St. Louis stye ribs. I let the ribs come up to room temperature, removed the membrane from the back of them, and covered themin the dry rub above. While I was doing this I was letting the smoker come up to temperature. Once I was done with applying the rub I went ahead and placed the ribs into the smoker. Every 45 minutes to an hour I would apply apple cider vinegar to the meat side of the ribs to keep the moisture. I pulled the ribts out of the smoker for the last 20 minutes at 2:10, wrapped them in foil, and put them back in for 20 minutes. I finally pulled the ribs out and let sit at 2:30. They looked awesome.
Eggs
I put the eggs in at 11:30 for 2 1/2 hours. I just took raw eggs and put them right into the smo,er. I saw a lot of recipies that called for hard boiling them, cracking them, and then putting them in the smoker but I put the eggs in raw. They seemed to cook fine and had decent smoke flavor.
Hamburgers
I was leary of doing hamburgers because after researching I thought there may be some danger with cooking raw hamburger slowly. I decided to try it and if they took over 2 hours to come up to temperature I would throw themout. I made thin patties so they would cook through quicker. The burgers were done in 1 1/4 hours.
Cooking Temperature
I had the smoker at Medium-High and using an oven thermometer I was able to see that the temperature was at a consistent 225 F. I opened the smoker probably more often than I should have and that dropped the temperature quite a bit I’m sure.
Final Product
The eggs turned out OK. They had a little smoke flavor and mostly tasted just like they were hard boiled. I would do them again as a filler if I have extra room on the grates in the smoker
The Hamburgers were awesome. After being afraid of them not cooking fast enough and worrying about doing them at all, having them in there for a little over an hour was actually too long. They came out medium-well and I prefer a medium-rare, but cooking them too long in a smokder probably isn’t a bad thing. They had AWESOME smoke flavor. I am looking forward to doing burgers like this again.
The Ribs turned out good too. It is hard to get true feedback from others when cooking for them because nobody wants to tell you that your food was no good, but people did seem to enjoy them. I believe the rub was a little too salty and that was probably because I to make up for running out of salt with Seasoned salt. That wasn’t the best idea but I needed to get the ribs onto the smoker. I will definately do ribs again probably with a little different dry rub, maybe a little lower temperature, and a few more hours of smoke time.